Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Namor brings indigenous fury to the MCU

They have no word for what Namor is. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever emphasizes this via his antagonist, a mysterious superhuman man who emerges from the depths of the ocean to threaten the film’s heroes.

“His people,” says M’Baku of Winston Duke in one of the film’s most memorable readings, “don’t call him a general or a king. you name him Kukulkan: the feathered serpent god.” It’s a level of mysticism that Namor lives up to as he speaks for himself for the first time and sneaks into the hidden land of Wakanda. In less than a minute, Tenoch Huerta’s performance adds to the mythos, imbuing his first, brief monologue with wonder, curiosity, history, and menace. He’s like nothing we’ve seen before. He is K’uk’ulkan, as his people call him. He is also, as he intones to Queen Ramonda, Namor to his enemies.

This is the first, strong hint that Namor has a side that’s both different and familiar, one that, upon closer inspection, takes the cartoonish fury of the comic book character he’s based on and roots it in something real. Like the few other good villains in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he is angry about something that matters, both to other characters in the film and to the real-world cultures for which he is a proxy. And like the best villains in all fiction, he is simply inevitable, the effect of causes that should not have been forgotten.

Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther films aren’t just adaptations, they’re reinventions. This is necessarily the case: much of the comic’s source material was not suited to modern sensibilities, dealing in stereotypes and outdated tropes that were in dire need of an update. Concurrent with an acclaimed comic book relaunch by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze, Coogler’s film gave the Black Panther and his kingdom a creative and thorough refresh that also highlighted much of what was already there to make Wakanda a more perfect African’s dream to make diaspora.

What Wakanda forever doing with Namor and his people is something more radical. In the Marvel Comics – in which Namor, aka Sub-Mariner, was one of the publishers first super-powered adventurers – the character’s origins lie in Atlantis, where he is born to a human explorer and an Atlantean princess. Namor, who inherited the throne of the mythical kingdom, would quickly come to favor his Atlantean heritage after witnessing the surface world’s carelessness towards the ocean, with the superpowers backing up his frequent threats against Earth’s landlovers.

Comics Namor is also an absolute pill. He is arrogant, rude, proud, firmly believes in his own superiority and is not afraid to tell you so. That means he’s incredibly fun to have in a story, and why he’s endured for nearly a century. It’s also practically meaningless: that arrogance doesn’t necessarily have to be rooted in anything; it’s just who he is.

All of that is different in Wakanda forever. The film’s biggest twist is a small one: the revelation that vibranium, the mysterious metal that powers Wakanda’s technology and economy, exists somewhere else on Earth. This new version of Namor hails from Talokan, an underwater nation formed on and around this other source of Vibranium. As the film progresses, Namor explains that Talokan was formed hundreds of years ago when European colonists arrived in the Yucatán Peninsula, bringing with them diseases that spread like wildfire among indigenous peoples.

Image: Marvel Studios

In desperation, a tribe discovers a vibranium-transformed plant that, when consumed, converts them into superhuman water breathers, allowing and enforcing a retreat to the depths of the ocean. Namor’s mother is among the transformed humans, which alters her pregnancy and turns her son into a mutant: he gains wings on his feet and distinctive pointy ears along with his people’s newfound powers, while retaining his natural skin color and the ability to take air to breathe. His people imbue his birth with divine significance, an incarnate link between their past and future, and the boy is destined to become king.

This is the subtle difference that changes everything: Namor, unlike the late T’Challa or those by whom he survived, represents and leads a nation born of loss, and this loss affects everything he does and does believes – and also allows the character to transcend his complicated four-color origins and becomes the perfect foil for a film about grief. It also imbues him with a specific, powerful kind of rage that is absent from the comic page, its origins Wakanda forever sets out in brief but searing detail.

Namor, now a boy, returns to the surface with others to bury his mother in the land where she was born, only to find it was settled by Spanish colonizers who enslaved the region’s indigenous people. Enraged, the boy and his mate Talokanil ravage the colony, killing everyone and cementing his hatred of the surface world. It takes its name from the torment of the colonizers it kills: In Wakanda foreverNamor is a portmanteau of the Spanish expression lovelessor “without love” – ​​a name his enemies must fear.

Image: Marvel Studios

In doing so, Namor becomes a metaphor for the Latin diaspora, a vast mosaic of people and cultures united by the plunder of colonialism and the extermination of indigenous nations. He is the embodiment of native roots almost erased from the world, a silent but powerful anger that is one of the few things shared by a diverse and diverse ethnic group. His anger springs from the bones of the earth and the fragmented cultural memory of Latin America. Much like Killmonger before him, he is the radicalized response to the fundamental crimes that make today’s prosperity – and injustice – possible.

In the comics, Namor has a catchphrase. It’s classic comic book stuff, something he screams when he makes a dramatic entrance or throws out a punch so big it pushes the confines of a single page. “Imperial Rex!” he roars, a phrase that roughly translates to “King of the Emperor,” a nonsensical exclamation of his own title, like a producer about to drop the beat on a hip-hop track. Read enough comics and you’ll cheer when it’s used.

Wakanda forever isn’t the kind of movie where that utterance makes sense, but it does find a moment at the end of the movie when Namor is defeated in battle and collapses before making a decision about how his war will end.

Image: Marvel Studios

He doesn’t say it in Latin, but in his people’s Yucatán Maya, a language director Ryan Coogler notes doesn’t know those words. Literally translated, the expression is slightly different: “eternal king”.

“He was made king before he was born; it was something he didn’t have a choice about, it was fate,” says Coogler. “He will live for a long time. And his duty is to make sure Talokan prospers to the point where they never have to worry about anything else again.”

It’s a beautiful dream for a world that no longer exists, the perfect blemish for a man who will always be king. It is the dream of K’uk’ulkan and Namor, the god of his people and the man without love. It is just what you say when your people have been forgotten by the world and you are ready to flood lands each morning to bring back their memories.